So the US has become a Third World nation. Ridesharing is a well established mode of transport for the middleclass in Africa and Southeast Asia who can't afford to ride single passenger taxis but want something more comfortable than the local equivalent of a bus.
Well the superficial changes she's made so far makes Yahoo more and more like Google that I'm beginning to think Mayer is Google's equivalent of Stephen Elop. She's not exactly running Yahoo to the ground the way Elop did but then again Google tend to have more finesse than Microsoft's embrace and extinguish approach to the competition. Google's fine with coop-tition so long as you don't threaten their bread-and-butter ad-nalytics business. So there you have Google happily funding Mozilla's yearly operations while pushing its own Chrome browser and making practically no moves to further eat into Safari's dominance of the Apple browser space.
"If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide."
That only works if you know what's wrong, and I'm not talking about obvious wrongs like killing people or stealing candy from a baby. With the mountain of laws that are in the books, the only way not to be a criminal is to stay at home and stop communicating with the outside world (no jaywalking, no libel, no copyright infringement). Assuming you can survive on the food you've hoarded, even that might not work. Who knows what health, tax or community laws you're violating just sitting in your basement?
The summary did say he "brought many of his future allies down", clearly a reference to the crew of a time-travelling Starship beaming themselves down to his office.
Provided it isn't elaborate as elaborate as a Hollywood set, I see no harm in him creating his own sort of private holodeck to survive the reality of his boring information processing job. At least Trekkies are fans of a utopian and relatively peaceful future. I shudder to think what would be going on in his mind if he had been a Star Wars, Matrix or Terminator fan.
"Mainstream music is awfully easy to make. 2 or 3 basic chords."
Most music is 2 or 3 basic chords. Why? Because that's what most people can remember in their heads. They want something that they whistle or hum at work. This is the extent of people's involvement with music. How many can hum an entire Beethoven/Chopin symphony/sonata? With the advent of karaoke, it became even more important for mainstream music to keep it simple stupid. The pop music of yesteryears, folk music, is almost entirely basic chords, major or minor depending on the song's mood.
Imagine a mugger who claimed that he's a good mugger because he left you with enough money to catch the bus home. Should you be thankful that he didn't shoot you and that "all" you lost was a few hundred dollars, your credit card, and last year's iPhone?
What the blog claims as the advantages of IP laws, such as DMCA's safe harbor and the limts on copyright and patents, are problems that wouldn't exist if the laws didn't exist in the first place (if the mugger didn't mug you, you wouldn't feel the need to be thankful that he spared your life).
I'm not sure. But I wouldn't be surprised. Actually I just managed to create a Hotmail address by providing a disposable email address and answering the trick, I mean security, question.
As a soon-to-be-former Google fan, I find it quite sad that I'd now be recommending Hotmail (aka Live/Outlook) as the least evil service among the Big 3 email providers.
Luck or rather iLuck has a lot to do with Apple's success. After the iMac, they got lucky with the iPod. After that, boosted by Steve Jobs's own inexplicable appeal as the world's greatest hawker, the iPhone was a simple matter of latching on to the iThing minimalist meme. The iPad? A large iPhone that Amazon would have probably invented if Apple had not.
See how Apple managed to parlay the letter "i" into a religion? None of the iPod, the iPhone or the IPad product lines would have been iNormously successful if they had been named otherwise. Apple products named differently have met with far more modest success if at all, e.g. Apple TV, Airplay.
A bit OT. But the first thing that struck me when I got to the NY Times story is a picture of the NSA headquarters that vaguely reminded me of Mecca, particularly the Kaaba, that black building at the center of the Islamic religion. Both buildings appear to rise up from their surrounds like the real life equivalent of the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
"Since that time, social networks and email providers such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and Yahoo! have embraced open identity standards."
And now these companies by converging on this supposed standard (and other standards such as cellular phone numbers) have effectively extinguished anonymity on the Web. It just goes to show that you Don't have to Be Evil to do evil.
Right now I'm trying to create a new Yahoo email address because some forum requires that I have a real email address, a permanent adresss that they can spam, rather than a throwaway 10-minute email address. But guess what, Yahoo wants me to surrender my cellphone number. For what? So the NSA can add a few more bytes to its data center?
"And perhaps more importantly, this finding goes a long way toward explaining why almost aliens in the universe look surprisingly identical to humans"
Since we're going off-tangent here, I'd say this finding goes a long way toward explaining why a Galaxy S looks surprisingly identical to an iPhone. Similar function, similar form. If you want a device with a touch screen and you want it in the sleekest form factor, with few hardware buttons and maximum screen real estate, you will come up with an iPhone. Or a Galaxy S.
You missed the two mainland Chinese companies. Too lazy to Google for them right now but that would be two of the following: Lenovo, Huawei or ZTE. LG is probably still porfitable until they get steamrolled by yet another rising Chinese company.
For all we know, the SEA is an Anonymous-type group where various individuals act independently for a common cause. Maybe none of the members know each other IRL but only through their online handles. If SEA is like @nonymous it could well be a group with a fluid leadership, individuals who step up as leaders for one attack and then just fade away or lie low when the heat gets to them. So exposing SEA's leaders might not amount to much as far as the group is concerned, only to the individual who had the misfortune of being outed.
The times call for faking normalcy, especially if you happen to belong on either end of the ideological/political/etc bell curve. So the best advice isn't to take extreme security measures like cryptography or a thumb drive you can insert up your ass, but to prepare a "normal" persona for those times you have to travel to places where the surveillance is more than the typical data mining of everybody's data. Your Jekyll persona will include gadgets that have been populated by work-safe data, which would necessarily rule out porn of any type or copyright-infringing media. Just remember that you'll also be suspicious if your laptop or smart phone looks as if it's been factory reset.
It isn't hard to imagine that instead of being sent to jail all those evil hackers, once they're found out, are actually put to good use by the government (good being a very relative term). Puts a whole new dimension to the concept of plea bargain.
Or maybe you should be asking: should the government have no limit as to what it can do in the name of protecting the country from supposed foreign conspiracies.
AMD and to a lesser extent, Intel, are misreading the mass market. What everybody else except those hardcore GamerZ (rhymes with lamers) want isn't more "powerful" desktop systems that consume enough watts to power a third world household with room to spare but more power efficient APUs, aka SoCs or systems on a chip. I know Intel can do it, but they simply don't want to cannibalize their sales of power inefficient high-end chips. So the typical user is stuck with desktop computers that simply have too much juice for their Twittering, Facebrowsing and Youtubating. I'll probably abandon my AMD desktop altogether for a quadcore ARM if I can find one with good FOSS graphics support. As it is, it's the abysmal opensource graphics support that's keeping me on the x86 koolaid.
" In short, the entire situation is a fucking nightmare. I can't see any solution to this conflict, and getting involved in it will fuck us over too. I honestly see Assad winning as the least horrible solution to this conflict now... and that's one pretty horrible alternative."
One vote for Assad as the lesser evil. Not that I think Assad should be in power at the moment. The best time to have rid Syria of Assad is past. Probably if some nations intervened militarily within a few months of the start of the armed conflict, Syria would be "merely" as chaotic as Libya right now. A quick removal of Assad at this point (say thru political assassination) would only lead to chaos far worse than the fall of Saddam.
Don't blame the Russians for toughing it out with Assad. Maybe their experience in Afghanistan has taught them that there are far worse things than a secular dictatorship.
Isn't reproducing an entire news article inviting our own IP troll suit? IANAL, but reproducing (and not just linking, paraphrasing or quoting in part) an entire news article appears to go beyond the fair use doctrine. Or what's to prevent, say, a newspaper from simply copypasting another newspaper's lead story?
I don't know how relevant this new info is to the problem, but there's an update over at the Sarah Sharp's G+ page:
"Update: Looks like this is an xHCI specific issue, and probably not the cause of the USB device disconnects under EHCI. To everyone who commented with other USB issues (none of which really sounded related), please email the linux-usb mailing list with a description of your issue."
Amazingly while we hear the usual moaning about the lack of downloadable firmware Google is actually among the fastest to release factory images for their products. No, I'm not talking about Google having a first shot at compiling the latest Android sources for Nexus X Y or Z. I'm talking about companies not releasing firmware for products that are already being sold with that firmware installed. What's preventing these companies from making available a freely downloadable backup of firmware that's already in the device anyway?
Also, the Google firmware update process is among the friendliest for people who don't own Windows computers. Upgrading most China-branded tablets require the use of a special USB "burning" tool that simply does the GUI'fied equivalent of "dd of=image_file if=some_device". A few tablet models give you the option to copy the upgrade files to an sdcard that you can then boot up using a special hardware button combination (e.g. Power Button + Volume Button Up or Down).
Is a Windows-free upgrade really that hard to implement? OTA or at least internal device-based upgrades should be a feature burned into the DNA of the next Android version and not implemented as an afterthought by companies whose idea of product support is uploading a rar file to Baidu.com.
..."as soon as some company makes an ARM processor that focuses on speed over power consumption, perhaps with active cooling"...
No, no, please, not another hornet in the room. A couple more watts to push the performance envelope are okay for a non-mobile system, but active cooling is the one evil in personal computing I wish would die a quick death. Typed from my buzzing AMD HTPC.
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So the US has become a Third World nation. Ridesharing is a well established mode of transport for the middleclass in Africa and Southeast Asia who can't afford to ride single passenger taxis but want something more comfortable than the local equivalent of a bus.
I won't be surprised if the Chinese government is doing what the governments of all other large countries are doing, spying on its own citizens.
Well the superficial changes she's made so far makes Yahoo more and more like Google that I'm beginning to think Mayer is Google's equivalent of Stephen Elop. She's not exactly running Yahoo to the ground the way Elop did but then again Google tend to have more finesse than Microsoft's embrace and extinguish approach to the competition. Google's fine with coop-tition so long as you don't threaten their bread-and-butter ad-nalytics business. So there you have Google happily funding Mozilla's yearly operations while pushing its own Chrome browser and making practically no moves to further eat into Safari's dominance of the Apple browser space.
"If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide."
That only works if you know what's wrong, and I'm not talking about obvious wrongs like killing people or stealing candy from a baby. With the mountain of laws that are in the books, the only way not to be a criminal is to stay at home and stop communicating with the outside world (no jaywalking, no libel, no copyright infringement). Assuming you can survive on the food you've hoarded, even that might not work. Who knows what health, tax or community laws you're violating just sitting in your basement?
The summary did say he "brought many of his future allies down", clearly a reference to the crew of a time-travelling Starship beaming themselves down to his office.
Provided it isn't elaborate as elaborate as a Hollywood set, I see no harm in him creating his own sort of private holodeck to survive the reality of his boring information processing job. At least Trekkies are fans of a utopian and relatively peaceful future. I shudder to think what would be going on in his mind if he had been a Star Wars, Matrix or Terminator fan.
"Mainstream music is awfully easy to make. 2 or 3 basic chords."
Most music is 2 or 3 basic chords. Why? Because that's what most people can remember in their heads. They want something that they whistle or hum at work. This is the extent of people's involvement with music. How many can hum an entire Beethoven/Chopin symphony/sonata? With the advent of karaoke, it became even more important for mainstream music to keep it simple stupid. The pop music of yesteryears, folk music, is almost entirely basic chords, major or minor depending on the song's mood.
Imagine a mugger who claimed that he's a good mugger because he left you with enough money to catch the bus home. Should you be thankful that he didn't shoot you and that "all" you lost was a few hundred dollars, your credit card, and last year's iPhone?
What the blog claims as the advantages of IP laws, such as DMCA's safe harbor and the limts on copyright and patents, are problems that wouldn't exist if the laws didn't exist in the first place (if the mugger didn't mug you, you wouldn't feel the need to be thankful that he spared your life).
I'm not sure. But I wouldn't be surprised. Actually I just managed to create a Hotmail address by providing a disposable email address and answering the trick, I mean security, question.
As a soon-to-be-former Google fan, I find it quite sad that I'd now be recommending Hotmail (aka Live/Outlook) as the least evil service among the Big 3 email providers.
Luck or rather iLuck has a lot to do with Apple's success. After the iMac, they got lucky with the iPod. After that, boosted by Steve Jobs's own inexplicable appeal as the world's greatest hawker, the iPhone was a simple matter of latching on to the iThing minimalist meme. The iPad? A large iPhone that Amazon would have probably invented if Apple had not.
See how Apple managed to parlay the letter "i" into a religion? None of the iPod, the iPhone or the IPad product lines would have been iNormously successful if they had been named otherwise. Apple products named differently have met with far more modest success if at all, e.g. Apple TV, Airplay.
Maybe because a mom would much rather hold the baby in her hands than stare at its Matrix-y manifestation.
A bit OT. But the first thing that struck me when I got to the NY Times story is a picture of the NSA headquarters that vaguely reminded me of Mecca, particularly the Kaaba, that black building at the center of the Islamic religion. Both buildings appear to rise up from their surrounds like the real life equivalent of the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
See for yourself and compare:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mosqu%C3%A9e_Masjid_el_Haram_%C3%A0_la_Mecque.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:National_Security_Agency_headquarters,_Fort_Meade,_Maryland.jpg
"Since that time, social networks and email providers such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and Yahoo! have embraced open identity standards."
And now these companies by converging on this supposed standard (and other standards such as cellular phone numbers) have effectively extinguished anonymity on the Web. It just goes to show that you Don't have to Be Evil to do evil.
Right now I'm trying to create a new Yahoo email address because some forum requires that I have a real email address, a permanent adresss that they can spam, rather than a throwaway 10-minute email address. But guess what, Yahoo wants me to surrender my cellphone number. For what? So the NSA can add a few more bytes to its data center?
"And perhaps more importantly, this finding goes a long way toward explaining why almost aliens in the universe look surprisingly identical to humans"
Since we're going off-tangent here, I'd say this finding goes a long way toward explaining why a Galaxy S looks surprisingly identical to an iPhone. Similar function, similar form. If you want a device with a touch screen and you want it in the sleekest form factor, with few hardware buttons and maximum screen real estate, you will come up with an iPhone. Or a Galaxy S.
"Only Samsung and Apple make money from phones."
You missed the two mainland Chinese companies. Too lazy to Google for them right now but that would be two of the following: Lenovo, Huawei or ZTE. LG is probably still porfitable until they get steamrolled by yet another rising Chinese company.
For all we know, the SEA is an Anonymous-type group where various individuals act independently for a common cause. Maybe none of the members know each other IRL but only through their online handles. If SEA is like @nonymous it could well be a group with a fluid leadership, individuals who step up as leaders for one attack and then just fade away or lie low when the heat gets to them. So exposing SEA's leaders might not amount to much as far as the group is concerned, only to the individual who had the misfortune of being outed.
The times call for faking normalcy, especially if you happen to belong on either end of the ideological/political/etc bell curve. So the best advice isn't to take extreme security measures like cryptography or a thumb drive you can insert up your ass, but to prepare a "normal" persona for those times you have to travel to places where the surveillance is more than the typical data mining of everybody's data. Your Jekyll persona will include gadgets that have been populated by work-safe data, which would necessarily rule out porn of any type or copyright-infringing media. Just remember that you'll also be suspicious if your laptop or smart phone looks as if it's been factory reset.
It isn't hard to imagine that instead of being sent to jail all those evil hackers, once they're found out, are actually put to good use by the government (good being a very relative term). Puts a whole new dimension to the concept of plea bargain.
Or maybe you should be asking: should the government have no limit as to what it can do in the name of protecting the country from supposed foreign conspiracies.
AMD and to a lesser extent, Intel, are misreading the mass market. What everybody else except those hardcore GamerZ (rhymes with lamers) want isn't more "powerful" desktop systems that consume enough watts to power a third world household with room to spare but more power efficient APUs, aka SoCs or systems on a chip. I know Intel can do it, but they simply don't want to cannibalize their sales of power inefficient high-end chips. So the typical user is stuck with desktop computers that simply have too much juice for their Twittering, Facebrowsing and Youtubating. I'll probably abandon my AMD desktop altogether for a quadcore ARM if I can find one with good FOSS graphics support. As it is, it's the abysmal opensource graphics support that's keeping me on the x86 koolaid.
I wish that would be the case. Then only those gun-slinging Libertarians would have a problem. But what if it's:
"Please act normal. You have 20 seconds to comply."
What if in the future the mere display of "abnormalities in human behavior", whatever that means to whoever decides, itself becomes a crime.
" In short, the entire situation is a fucking nightmare. I can't see any solution to this conflict, and getting involved in it will fuck us over too. I honestly see Assad winning as the least horrible solution to this conflict now... and that's one pretty horrible alternative."
One vote for Assad as the lesser evil. Not that I think Assad should be in power at the moment. The best time to have rid Syria of Assad is past. Probably if some nations intervened militarily within a few months of the start of the armed conflict, Syria would be "merely" as chaotic as Libya right now. A quick removal of Assad at this point (say thru political assassination) would only lead to chaos far worse than the fall of Saddam.
Don't blame the Russians for toughing it out with Assad. Maybe their experience in Afghanistan has taught them that there are far worse things than a secular dictatorship.
Isn't reproducing an entire news article inviting our own IP troll suit? IANAL, but reproducing (and not just linking, paraphrasing or quoting in part) an entire news article appears to go beyond the fair use doctrine. Or what's to prevent, say, a newspaper from simply copypasting another newspaper's lead story?
I don't know how relevant this new info is to the problem, but there's an update over at the Sarah Sharp's G+ page:
"Update: Looks like this is an xHCI specific issue, and probably not the cause of the USB device disconnects under EHCI. To everyone who commented with other USB issues (none of which really sounded related), please email the linux-usb mailing list with a description of your issue."
Captcha: corrects (I hope I'm not wrong.)
Amazingly while we hear the usual moaning about the lack of downloadable firmware Google is actually among the fastest to release factory images for their products. No, I'm not talking about Google having a first shot at compiling the latest Android sources for Nexus X Y or Z. I'm talking about companies not releasing firmware for products that are already being sold with that firmware installed. What's preventing these companies from making available a freely downloadable backup of firmware that's already in the device anyway?
Also, the Google firmware update process is among the friendliest for people who don't own Windows computers. Upgrading most China-branded tablets require the use of a special USB "burning" tool that simply does the GUI'fied equivalent of "dd of=image_file if=some_device". A few tablet models give you the option to copy the upgrade files to an sdcard that you can then boot up using a special hardware button combination (e.g. Power Button + Volume Button Up or Down).
Is a Windows-free upgrade really that hard to implement? OTA or at least internal device-based upgrades should be a feature burned into the DNA of the next Android version and not implemented as an afterthought by companies whose idea of product support is uploading a rar file to Baidu.com.
..."as soon as some company makes an ARM processor that focuses on speed over power consumption, perhaps with active cooling"...
No, no, please, not another hornet in the room. A couple more watts to push the performance envelope are okay for a non-mobile system, but active cooling is the one evil in personal computing I wish would die a quick death. Typed from my buzzing AMD HTPC.